There has been a desire on the part of appliance manufacturers to develop a one-piece door construction in appliances such as ranges and microwave ovens to reduce fabrication costs. Gaskets would have to be attached to such doors from an exterior side using some type of mechanical fastening.
One approach for mechanically mounting such gaskets to one-piece doors has been disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,822,060. That patent discloses providing a flexible, hollow cylindrical gasket with clip-type fasteners protruding along one side thereof. Such gaskets are formed from a hollow, tubular, knitted wire core and braided, glass fiber yarn outer jacket, somewhat similar to the cylindrical members of the old gasket assemblies. A single wire member is bent at several locations along its length to form a series of connected clip members and inserted through the core and jacket and generally captured. Other designs of the same assignee, Bentley-Harris, are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,205,075; 5,289,658; 5,341,601 and 5,395,126, all incorporated by reference herein.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,107,623 describes another type of gasket construction that includes an elongated core; a woven outer jacket surrounding the core and extending along the core; and a plurality of separate, individual fasteners spaced along the device. Each fastener has a base captured between the core and the woven outer jacket. Each fastener base is irremovably retained between portions of the core and the woven outer jacket adjoining one another and the base by the adjoining portions of the core and woven outer jacket. Each fastener further has an engagement portion extending away from the base and the adjoining portion of the core and through the adjoining portion of the woven outer jacket, protruding outwardly from the woven outer jacket. The individual fasteners are connected to one another in the device only through the capture of each fastener by the core and woven outer jacket.
Termination of either type of gasket is currently relatively unattractive. The ends of the gasket are simply brought together and overlapped in some fashion, either side by side or telescopically and fixed together with a suitable fastener such as a staple. Unless the appliance manufacturer can hide the joint thus formed in some way, for example, by covering it with part of a door panel, it will remain visible on the oven door where the exposed gasket end(s) will eventually begin to fray.
In an oven gasket including an elongated seamless flexible tubular member formed from at least a plurality of interwoven glass fiber yarn ends and a plurality of fasteners spaced along the tubular member, each fastener including a base located within the tubular member and an engagement portion extending outwardly through the tubular member away from the base, the improvement wherein two free ends of the tubular member are coupled together at a joint so that the elongated tubular member forms a closed loop, and a second tubular member is positioned around the joint, concealing the joint..